When my special, every-Thursday-antiquing f riend of 50 years passed, her dear children appeared on my doorstep bearing pieces we had found together on endless treasure hunts\u00a0 and presented them to me.\u00a0 \u00a0“Doesn’t it make you SAD.”\u00a0 someone asked, “to have these things?”\u00a0 Oh, no!\u00a0 On the contrary!\u00a0 I recall with\u00a0\u00a0 great joy each\u00a0 and every bush that we beat in New England to find EVERY one!\u00a0 Anyway,\u00a0 among the treasures was a carved wooden plaque of a whimsical bird unlike any we had ever seen.\u00a0\u00a0 Dot called it “The Dinkey Bird” and bought it immediately.\u00a0\u00a0 She referred to a well-loved children’s verse by Eugene Field of the same name.<\/p>\n
When I inherited The Dinkey Bird, I added color to it, thinking it should be in a child’s room somewhere.\u00a0\u00a0 But I haven’t been able to part with it because I like to think that Dot Hartzog is waiting for me\u00a0 someplace “where the dinkey bird is singing in the amfalula tree” and it is an\u00a0 everyday sweet reminder of a rare and wonderful friendship.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When my special, every-Thursday-antiquing f riend of 50 years passed, her dear children appeared on my doorstep bearing pieces we had found together on endless treasure hunts\u00a0 and presented them to me.\u00a0 \u00a0“Doesn’t it make you SAD.”\u00a0 someone asked, “to have these things?”\u00a0 Oh, no!\u00a0 On the contrary!\u00a0 I recall with\u00a0\u00a0 great joy each\u00a0 and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=406"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegrandies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}